A Feast for Dragons

out.” He did not wait for Lord Bracken to reply but touched
Honor lightly with his golden spurs and trotted off. His men formed up and
followed, banners streaming. Castle and camp were soon lost behind them,
obscured by the dust of their hooves.
    Neither outlaws nor wolves had troubled them on their way to
Raventree, so Jaime decided to return by a different route. If the gods were
good, he might stumble on the Blackfish, or lure Beric Dondarrion into an
unwise attack.
    They were following the Widow’s Wash when they ran out of
day. Jaime called his hostage forward and asked him where to find the nearest
ford, and the boy led them there. As the column splashed across the shallow waters,
the sun was setting behind a pair of grassy hills. “The Teats,” said Hoster
Blackwood.
    Jaime recalled Lord Bracken’s map. “There’s a village
between those hills.”
    “Pennytree,” the lad confirmed.
    “We’ll camp there for the night.” If there were villagers
about, they might have knowledge of Ser Brynden or the outlaws. “Lord Jonos
made some remark about whose teats they were,” he recalled to the Blackwood boy
as they rode toward the darkening hills and the last light of the day. “The
Brackens call them by one name and the Blackwoods by another.”
    “Aye, my lord. For a hundred years or so. Before that, they
were the Mother’s Teats, or just the Teats. There are two of them, and it was
thought that they resembled …”
    “I can see what they resemble.” Jaime found himself thinking
back on the woman in the tent and the way she’d tried to hide her large, dark
nipples. “What changed a hundred years ago?”
    “Aegon the Unworthy took Barba Bracken as his mistress,” the
bookish boy replied. “She was a very buxom wench, they say, and one day when
the king was visiting at the Stone Hedge he went out hunting and saw the Teats
and …”
    “… named them for his mistress.” Aegon the Fourth had
died long before Jaime had been born, but he recalled enough of the history of
his reign to guess what must have happened next. “Only later he put the Bracken
girl aside and took up with a Blackwood, was that the way of it?”
    “Lady Melissa,” Hoster confirmed. “Missy, they called her.
There’s a statue of her in our godswood. She was
much
more
beautiful than Barba Bracken, but slender, and Barba was heard to say that
Missy was flat as a boy. When King Aegon heard, he …”
    “… gave her Barba’s teats.” Jaime laughed. “How did all
this begin, between Blackwood and Bracken? Is it written down?”
    “It is, my lord,” the boy said, “but some of the histories
were penned by their maesters and some by ours, centuries after the events that
they purport to chronicle. It goes back to the Age of Heroes. The Blackwoods
were kings in those days. The Brackens were petty lords, renowned for breeding
horses. Rather than pay their king his just due, they used the gold their
horses brought them to hire swords and cast him down.”
    “When did all this happen?”
    “Five hundred years before the Andals. A thousand, if the
True
History
is to be believed. Only no one knows when the Andals crossed
the narrow sea. The
True History
says four thousand years have
passed since then, but some maesters claim that it was only two. Past a certain
point, all the dates grow hazy and confused, and the clarity of history becomes
the fog of legend.”
    Tyrion would like this one. They could talk from dusk
to dawn, arguing about books
. For a moment his bitterness toward his
brother was forgotten, until he remembered what the Imp had done. “So you are
fighting over a crown that one of you took from the other back when the
Casterlys still held Casterly Rock, is that the root of it? The crown of a
kingdom that has not existed for thousands of years?” He chuckled. “So many
years, so many wars, so many kings … you’d think someone would have
made a peace.”
    “Someone did, my lord. Many someones. We’ve had a hundred
peaces with the Brackens, many sealed with marriages. There’s Blackwood blood
in every Bracken, and Bracken blood in every Blackwood. The Old King’s Peace lasted
half a century. But then some fresh quarrel broke out, and the old wounds
opened and began to bleed again. That’s how it always happens, my father says.
So long as men remember the wrongs done to their forebears, no peace will ever
last. So we go on century after century, with us hating the Brackens and them
hating us. My